And I heard her
a moment after, at the stair-head, directing Branston to let Dr. Bryerly
know that she awaited him in the drawing-room.
And now she was gone, and I began to wonder and speculate. Why should
my cousin Monica make all this fuss about, after all, a very natural
arrangement? My uncle, whatever he might have been, was now a good man--a
religious man--perhaps a little severe; and with this thought a dark streak
fell across my sky.
A cruel disciplinarian! had I not read of such characters?--lock and
key, bread and water, and solitude! To sit locked up all night in a dark
out-of-the-way room, in a great, ghosty, old-fashioned house, with no one
nearer than the other wing. What years of horror in one such night! Would
not this explain my poor father's hesitation, and my cousin Monica's
apparently disproportioned opposition? When an idea of terror presents
itself to a young person's mind, it transfixes and fills the vision,
without respect of probabilities or reason.
My uncle was now a terrible old martinet, with long Bible lessons,
lectures, pages of catechism, sermons to be conned by rote, and an awful
catalogue of punishments for idleness, and what would seem to him impiety.
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